Skip to main content

Searching with pattern databases

  • Knowledge Representation V: Search
  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Advances in Artifical Intelligence (Canadian AI 1996)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1081))

Abstract

The efficiency of A searching depends on the quality of the lower bound estimates of the solution cost. Pattern databases enumerate all possible subgoals required by any solution, subject to constraints on the subgoal size. Each subgoal in the database provides a tight lower bound on the cost of achieving it. For a given state in the search space, all possible subgoals are looked up, with the maximum cost over all lookups being the lower bound. For sliding tile puzzles, the database enumerates all possible patterns containing N tiles and, for each one, contains a lower bound on the distance to correctly move all N tiles into their correct final location. For the 15-Puzzle, iterative-deepening A with pattern databases (N=8) reduces the total number of nodes searched on a standard problem set of 100 positions by over 1000-fold.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. J. Culberson and J. Schaeffer. Efficiently Searching the 15-Puzzle, TR 94-08, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta.

    Google Scholar 

  2. R. Gasser. Harnessing Computational Resources for Efficient Exhaustive Search. Ph.D., ETH Zurich, Switzerland, December, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  3. O. Hansson, A. Mayer and M. Yung. Criticizing Solutions to Relaxed Models Yields Powerful Admissible Heuristics. Information Sciences, vol. 63, no. 3, pp. 207–227, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  4. W. Holst. Unpublished research, University of Alberta, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  5. E. Horowitz and S. Sahni. Fundamentals of Computer Algorithms, Computer Science Press, 1978.

    Google Scholar 

  6. R. Korf. Depth-First Iterative-Deepening: An Optimal Admissible Tree Search. Artificial Intelligence, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 97–109, 1985.

    Google Scholar 

  7. R. Korf. Planning as Search: A Quantitative Approach Artificial Intelligence, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 65–88, 1987.

    Google Scholar 

  8. R. Korf. Real-Time Heuristic Search. Artificial Intelligence, vol. 42, no. 2–3, pp. 189–211, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  9. R. Korf. Linear-Space Best-First Search. Artificial Intelligence, vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 41–78, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  10. G. Manzini. BIDA: An Improved Perimeter Search Algorithm Artificial Intelligence, vol. 75, no. 2, pp. 347–360, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  11. D. Ratner and M. Warmuth. Finding a Shortest Solution for the (N × N)-Extension of the 15-Puzzle is Intractable, Journal of Symbolic Computation, vol. 10, pp. 111–137, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  12. A. Reinefeld. Complete Solution of the Eight-Puzzle and the Benefit of Node Ordering in IDA, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 248–253, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  13. A. Reinefeld. Private communication, September, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  14. A. Reinefeld and T. Marsland. Enhanced Iterative-Deepening Search, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 16, no. 7, pp. 701–710, July, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  15. J. Schaeffer, J. Culberson, N. Treloar, B. Knight, P. Lu and D. Szafron. A World Championship Caliber Checkers Program, Artificial Intelligence, vol. 53, no. 2–3, pp. 273–290, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  16. L. Taylor and R. Korf. Pruning Duplicate Nodes in Depth-First Search, AAAI National Conference, pp. 756–761, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Gordon McCalla

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Culberson, J.C., Schaeffer, J. (1996). Searching with pattern databases. In: McCalla, G. (eds) Advances in Artifical Intelligence. Canadian AI 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1081. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61291-2_68

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61291-2_68

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-61291-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68450-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics